


Red Moon

by HallowAvengence



Category: Pretty Little Liars
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-25
Updated: 2017-02-25
Packaged: 2018-09-26 18:45:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9916091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HallowAvengence/pseuds/HallowAvengence
Summary: A version of the soulmate trope: Red Moons are rare, but when they happen, people teleport in their sleep to their soulmate's bed. Emily's first three red moons and her last.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So this is kind of set after 5x05 and then ignores everything after that, mainly because I'm only halfway though season 5 and I have a feeling things aren't going to go the way I want them to for Emily. And I'm not ready to give up a happy Emily Fields, who might be a doctor, and is happily married to Paige and has an over-excitable rescue dog called Plinky.

Emily falls asleep beside Alison and wakes up being spooned by Paige.

The room is unfamiliar in the dark, but the smell of the sheets, the loose curl of auburn hair in the corner of her gaze, and the warm weight of contentment that settles in her stomach are enough to clue her in.

She slips out of the bed and away without looking behind her. Paige doesn’t stir.

She makes her way back to Alison’s house in the early dusky morning. The other girl is still fast alseep between the pink sheets and Emily climbs back in quietly and wonders how she managed to get things so wrong.

The next morning Alison says nothing about Emily’s midnight disappearance and Emily wonders if someone had filled her own place in Alison’s bed and had snuck away from Ali as Emily had from Paige.

 

* * *

 

Things are normal for a while. At least as normal as things in Rosewood ever are with A and Mona and sneaking away to kiss her miraculously not dead best friend.

Paige seems to be everywhere at school though. And Emily takes to carrying armfuls of books around, so she can drop them and duck without looking suspicious or crazy.

She gets an A+ on a biology exam and Mrs Greener presses a handful of college guides into her hand that have good bio-med programmes as she leaves class one day. Emily thinks of her Dad and his heart, her swimming and her shoulder. She thinks how good it would feel to be able to fix people, to stitch them back together, and steady them on their feet.

There’s another red moon scheduled for the next evening. She declines Alison’s offer to sleep over and instead goes to Aria’s. Aria, who, to her disappointment had woken up in Ezra’s bed the last red moon, had read somewhere that provided they didn’t fall asleep while the moon was out, they’d stay exactly where they were.

Emily steals as much of the good ground coffee beans from work as she can before her conscious twinges and turns up at Aria’s slightly late and already hyper caffeinated.

Aria grins manically at her when she opens the door, murmurs an _I love you_ into her collarbone and drags her inside. All the lights are on and there’s a stack of horror films on the hallway table.

‘I figure’, says Aria, in the quick chipper voice she uses when she’s trying too hard to be okay, ‘that if we creep ourselves out so much that we don’t _want_ to sleep then it will be a whole lot easier _not_ to fall asleep’.

Emily nods and digs her hands into her pockets to stop herself reaching for another hug, ‘I brought all of my Dad’s _Metallica_ albums just in case too’.

 

* * *

 

It works. They both fall asleep on Aria’s bed sometime around five as it’s beginning to get light and wake up at nine, late for school and exhausted. Aria grins triumphantly around her toothbrush as they vie for space in the bathroom but Emily feels strangely disappointed.

Paige is a ghost in the hallways at school that day. Every time Emily seems to catch sight of her, she disappears a second later. Alison’s there though, constantly pushing herself into Emily’s line of sight, all stubborn chin and cold blue eyes.

 

* * *

 

 

The four of them go for coffee after school, without Alison. It’s easier to breathe just the four of them.

‘Whose bed did you wake up in Em?’ Hanna asks bluntly, fingers chasing flakes of pasty around her plate.

‘ _Hanna_ ’, Aria scolds.

‘What? Like you aren’t itching to ask too?’ Hanna counters and Emily grins around a familiar feeling of fondness and exasperation. 

‘Who did you wake up with, Em?’ Spencer asks, softer than Hanna, but unable to hide her curiosity.

Emily stares into her coffee cup.

‘It wasn’t Alison was it?’ Spencer prompts and Emily shakes her head, says ‘Paige’ and hates how her voice cracks slightly on the second syllable. 

Aria runs a smoothing hand down her spine and across the table Hanna smirks and says, ‘I wonder who Alison’s soulmate is?’

‘An iceberg’, Spencer says shortly and they all snort into their coffee like kids.

 

* * *

 

The third red moon, the last supposedly for 50 years, is a month later.

Aria and Ezra are all fixed and happy and so Emily is left to drink coffee and watch horror films alone this time. It’s harder without Aria’s hand in her own, nudging her when her head droops and soon enough she falls asleep at an odd angle at her desk.

When she wakes it’s fully light. Paige is propped up on one arm beside her, face unreadable.

‘You stayed this time,’ she says.

Emily blinks at her, opens her mouth to apologise, to make her excuses and leave, but instead what comes out is ‘it was you all along, I just didn’t realise’.

Paige stares at her for a good minute and then says, ‘right’, and kisses her.

 

* * *

 

Emily’s final red moon is many years later.

She walks with a cane, has gone from being 5”7 to 5”2, and has forgotten what it feels like to be afraid.

She fall asleep next to Paige and wakes up next to Paige and laughs sleepily into her wife’s hair as she imagines an 70 year old Alison Dilaurentis spooning an iceberg.

 


End file.
